history of language

→ April 4, 2019
→ By keith

Between You and Me.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor at the New Yorker for several decades, and, based on her book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is what I had always imagined copy editors to be before I became a professional writer. If you’ve seen the last season of The Wire, you know the archetype I’m describing: The human dictionary, someone not just familiar with the finer points of grammar and syntax but who revels in those distinctions, and thus becomes both indispensable to harried writers who might not find the right word or who err in their usage as well as the sworn enemy of the same writers who, like me, would prefer to believe that their copy was perfect when it was filed.

Norris does a lot of that, it seems, and some of those language quirks serve as the starting points here for individual chapters that meander through questions of usage or linguistic evolution but also through fun or interesting stories from her forty years at one of the most revered English-language publications. The New Yorker has published works, fiction and non-fiction, from some of this country’s most esteemed writers, and Norris was able to edit and work with many of them, with her working relationship with Philip Roth earning significant mention in the book (a weird coincidence, since I just read a fictionalized version of a romantic relationship with him in Asymmetry). The publication is also well-known for maintaining standards on language, grammar, and orthography that, depending on your perspective, are either a noble attempt to fight the erosion of linguistic excellence or pretentious prescriptivism that leads people to say grammar is just something white people like. (I admit to sympathizing with the former sentiment more than the latter, but even the New Yorker loses me by putting a diaeresis in coöperation.) George Saunders has praised her editing, as has longtime editor in chief David Remnick.

The best parts of Confessions of a Comma Queen, for me at least, are the anecdotes about battles, internal and internecine, over editing decisions. I often answer people on social media or in chats by saying that “words have meanings,” a bromide that I think gets at a deeper truth: any modern language has a panoply of ways to describe just about anything, and in most cases these different words or phrases will differ slightly in denotation or connotation, so that in most cases there will be one or two optimal choices. Yet the subjectivity of language and its limitations in expressing the variety of human thought also mean that rational, intelligent people may even disagree over which words are the right ones. Norris details some of those battles and even more trivial ones, devoting much of one chapter to the hyphen, another to the semicolon (perhaps my favorite punctuation mark, but one she derides), and of course quite a bit to the comma, although I think she ultimately comes down on the wrong side of the debate over the serial, Oxford, or Harvard comma.

There’s a wonderful chapter on profanity that is appropriately filled with f-bombs, as well as a strangely fascinating chapter that is mostly dedicated to Norris’ quest for more #1 pencils, which I only knew existed by imputation, since I was always required to use #2 pencils for standardized tests and had seen #3 pencils (useless) but to this day have never laid eyes on a #1 pencil. The story of the pencils has no inherent drama but Norris manages to turn it into a comic escapade, complete with a delightful back-and-forth with the CEO of the pencil company whose pencils she ultimately obtains. There’s a discussion of the singular they, and other (failed) gender-neutral pronouns, that has become even more salient today than it was when Norris wrote about it, and of course the title’s phrase looms large in another discussion of how people misuse pronouns by saying things like “between you and I” or “me and Joey Bagodonuts both went 0-for today.”

I only had one real quibble with Between You and Me and it might not matter if you read the printed version. I listened to the audiobook, and Norris’ attempts to read Noah Webster’s writings, which used ?, a character known as the medial s that looks like an f but actually isn’t one, comes off like she’s mocking someone with a speech impediment; treating that character as an f is funny once, as a joke, but Norris carries it too far while ignoring the fact that it’s not an f at all. That gag slightly sours another wonderful chapter that explains how much of even contemporary English usage derives from decisions Webster made unilaterally on what was “proper” English, as well as other changes he advocated that never caught on. It’s a great read for the stickler in your life, or any writer/editor who might enjoy reading about the editing life and culture of one of America’s great and most distinctive magazines.

Next up: John Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Grammar, highly recommended, history of language, non-fiction, writing

→ August 29, 2018
→ By keith

Word by Word.

Until just last year, if you wanted to read a popular non-fiction book about dictionaries, there was really just one title – The Professor and the Madman, the runaway hit by Simon Winchester that tells the story of the strange relationship between James Murray, the primary editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary, and, Dr. W.C. Minor, an erudite murderer who contributed countless citations for words in the book while writing from the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. The book was more about that partnership than the creation of the dictionary itself; Winchester followed it up with The Meaning of Everything to tell the rest of the story of the OED’s creation, but it lacked the verve of the first book.

Kory Stamper, a lexicographer who worked for Merriam-Webster for about two decades, has now contributed to this niche with a ribald and totally fascinating book about her experiences there and what really goes into the making of a modern dictionary in Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, which turns what might appear to be a staid subject into almost a romp through the process of making and revising definitions. That process is changing rapidly in the digital age, and Stamper seems to have hit this topic at the perfect time, right up to a description of the staff cuts at M-W that happened just a few years ago (right before her departure, I think), and to a last chapter on the way lexicographers – people who write and edit dictionaries – now have a much different role, one that has them interacting with readers more than before and in more direct fashion. With Merriam-Webster also making aggressive moves on to social media – their Twitter account is a must follow, as their subtweet game is a grade 80 for me – and re-establishing itself as the preeminent brand in its space even as Google tries to obviate dictionaries completely by defining words on page one of search results, it’s an ideal time to examine and reconsider the importance of dictionaries in the lives of anyone who loves or lives by language.

Word by Word doesn’t have a straight narrative, but there are consistent themes running through the book that tie widely disparate chapters together, none more strongly than the innate love of words and language that connects lexicographers and folks, like me, who still find pleasure in getting lost in a dictionary. (I was one of those kids who, when bored, would pull the dictionary or a volume of our World Book encyclopedia off the shelf and read pages at random.) Stamper uses those ties to walk readers through and around the dictionary’s essential contents, such as the way definitions are written, the structure and purpose of etymologies, and how dictionaries handle thorny matters like how to handle offensive words or when to even identify words as such (in the chapter “Bitch”), how to ensure that definitions aren’t unintentionally biased (in the chapter “Nude” – think pantyhose), and how to handle words that some people don’t think are words (“irregardless” – not a proper word, but because it’s a word people use, it has to be in the dictionary). I’m sort of amazed at how much flak Stamper reports getting from readers who believe that the dictionary has the authority to control the language, like the Académie Française, or even to alter society. The chapter on the word “Marriage” revolves, of course, around Merriam-Webster’s internal debate over how to handle same-sex marriage – first acknowledging it in a second definition, and eventually simply defining it, as they do now, without regard to gender or identity: “the state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.” There’s a usage note at that link, discussing the controversy and saying that “This is not an issue to be resolved by dictionaries,” although it’s clear that no one ever reads the intro or the usage notes.

Stamper has a prodigious vocabulary, which is hardly surprising, and writes with a mixture of the erudition and ease of a David Foster Wallace, mixing high and lowbrow humor with aplomb, and never dumbing down her prose or patronizing the readers. This is an unapologetically smart book for people who don’t blench at obscure words or mind a didactic or technical discussion of word origins or how best to phrase a definition. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in many places, in part because Stamper can really craft a good story, and in part because some of what she describes – reader feedback, in-house arguments, even an escapade with the cleaning crew messing up her notes – is just so ridiculous. And throughout it all is a genuine love of words, one I truly share. I still write down new words I encounter in books – ouroboros is one I recently found – so I can look them up, and have a little notebook with those words and their definitions because maybe some day I’ll need one of them. Even if I don’t, I still have them and can appreciate them for their own sake. I think Ms. Stamper would approve.

Next up: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, history of language, non-fiction

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, board games, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

→ April 20, 2016
→ By keith

Lingo.

I saw a woman reading Gaston Dorren’s Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages at the Philly airport in early March and, since she said it was worth reading, grabbed the audio version for my spring training drives around Florida (which has some seriously boring highways). I haven’t had time to devote to language-learning in years – something to do with having a kid – but my lifelong obsession with foreign languages hasn’t abated; I find everything about them fascinating, even the ‘boring’ stuff like grammar and syntax. Lingo could have been written just for me, as it skips a lot of the linguistics stuff and instead flits around sixty of Europe’s languages, with goofy anecdotes and brief histories on each to keep the book moving.

There is no central narrative at work in Lingo; this is a dilettante’s work and a book for the peripatetic mind. You don’t have to speak any of the languages Dorren covers to appreciate some of the stories of how languages morphed, or hidden similarities between languages, or the ways languages have defined peoples and borders in Europe. Dorren starts off with Lithuanian, a language that bears many clues to what the forerunner of most European languages, clumsily called Proto-Indo-European, may have looked like, before an immediate tangent on the main oddballs of Europe, the Finno-Ugric languages (Magyar/Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian), which bear no resemblance at all to their geographic neighbors. Portuguese owes much of its existence to Galician. Dorren describes the “linguistic orphanage” of the Balkans, where Serbian and Croatian are kind of the same language written in different alphabets while the people who speak Macedonian and live in Macedonia have to call their country something else because the Greeks might get mad. (Speaking of which, shouldn’t one of the conditions of the bailout of Greece been that they leave the Macedonians the hell alone?)

Tiny languages like Luxembourgish, Sorbian (from the NBC Saturday morning cartoon show The Sorbs), Sami, and Gagauz get their own chapters, illuminating the battles languages with small populations fight to survive. Some don’t make it; Dalmatian’s brief life and quick death gets a chapter, but the rebirths of Cornish and Manx, two Celtic languages that are two of the only success stories in that department. (The fact that both are spoken in the United Kingdom, a highly developed country, is probably not a coincidence.) Basque, the language isolate spoken in Spain, gets its own chapter, although I think Dorren gave it short shrift; its linguistic origins are unknown despite lengthy efforts to try to connect it to various language families, and its survival despite the lack of a state and its enclave status within Spain’s panoply of dialects make it one of the language world’s most fascinating stories.

Dorren had to face a huge challenge finding something interesting to say on all of these languages, but succeeds more than he fails by finding surprising angles. Turkish, the primary member of the Turkic language family, gets a chapter devoted to its alphabet; the official shift to the Roman alphabet in the 1920s carried enormous political and religious significance. He accurately dubs Esperanto “the no-hoper,” and the chapter on Albanian becomes a story of a few lonesome Albanologists. Hungarian’s chapter is presented as a conversation between the language and its therapist, shortly after the chapter on the variety of European sign languages; I profess my ignorance at just how many sign languages there are worldwide. And he ends with English, which he calls “the global headache,” the universal language that Esperanto (and Volapük and other pretenders) will never unseat, a language with maddening internal inconsistencies in grammar, spelling, and pronunciation that make our complaints about conjugating irregular Spanish verbs seem trivial in comparison.

The lack of any common thread through all the chapters makes Lingo a bit choppy to read, with no story beyond any one language, almost like reading a sort of half-serious reference work rather than the kind of narrative non-fiction I tend to favor. But Lingo also made me nostalgic for when I did have the time to learn bits of other languages, whether in school or on my own, and wonder when I might get another chance to do something like that – maybe spending a few weeks abroad at some point in my life so I can learn via immersion. The sheer diversity of languages in Europe and the aesthetic and literary beauty of many of those tongues comes through in Dorren’s book, even with all of his flitting from one to the next.

Next up: Angela Carter’s highly acclaimed novel Nights at the Circus, which won the Best of the James Tait Black honor in 2012 as the best of the 93 previous winners of the annual award, and was also on David Bowie’s personal top 100 books list.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, history of language, Languages, non-fiction

→ January 26, 2011
→ By keith

Alphabet Juice.

The 2011 organizational rankings are up on ESPN.com for Insiders. The two most upset fan bases are Cleveland, because I ranked them 17th; and the Yankees, because I didn’t rank the Red Sox 30th.

—

> special
“It’s good that they don’t make many players like Albert Pujols, because if there were more, he wouldn’t be so special, and Albert Pujols is very special.” – Murray Chass, The New York Times. See special.

Roy Blount, Jr., humorist, former sportswriter, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me… panelist, and word-lover, takes aim at etymology and bad writing alike in Alphabet Juice, a book organized like a dictionary and aiming both high and low with its targets. If you like words and get equal joy from a malapropism and an explanation of how livid (which means furious, with a connotation of red-faced) comes from the Latin word meaning “to be bluish,” this is a book for you.

In Alphabet Juice, Blount chooses words with interesting stories or for which he can offer a brief quote (like the one above) or quip or (regrettably) some light verse. The anecdote that constitutes the entry for “TV, on being on” runs from William Ginsburg to Saul Bellow to Designing Women to Kathleen Sullivan to Claude Monet, all inside of four pages. Blount sneaks in some memoir-ish material as well, such as an entry for “Wilt: A Tall Tale,” that starts out with musings on whether Wilt Chamberlain could really have slept with 20,000 women (Wilt: “Well, there was this one birthday party…”) but ends with Blount mediating between an angry Wilt and Blount’s drunken editor.

Some of the entries reveal Blount as a Lynne Truss-ian grammar stickler, a bent of which I approve:

> unique
I have to be firm on this: unique is not to be modified. Adding very or absolutely is like putting a propeller on a rabbit to make him hop better. It won’t work, and he won’t be a rabbit any more.

I’ve always been partial to the analogy that something can be “almost unique” in the way that you can be “almost pregnant.” There is a word for the idea expressed by “almost unique” – unusual. Use it. Please.

Blount’s love of words (aside from a love of language – these are two different afflictions) even brings this fun entry that should appeal to the anagrammists and Scrabblers in the audience:

> transposition game
Rearranging the letters in one word of an existing title or well-known phrase. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception becomes The Odors of Perception. The Continental Army becomes the continental Mary. I’m told that Burt Bernstein, then a writer at The New Yorker, learned of this game and found himself to be good at it. He hastened to his brother Leonard, who had always been better at everything than Burt, but now, finally, maybe … Burt explained the game. Leonard looked up from whatever major thing he was doing and said: “Icy fingers up and down my penis.”

If there’s a flaw in Alphabet Juice, it’s that it’s a book to be perused rather than read. There’s no narrative, and the themes and jokes to which Blount returns again and again are scattered throughout the book. You could follow his suggestions to see other entries, but would risk never reading everything in the book, a risk I was unwilling to take. I could also have done without the meditations on each individual letter – Blount is supporting an argument he makes that the relation between a word (its sound, that is) and its meaning is not, as some scholars would have it, arbitrary. That’s an interesting debate, but not one Blount is going to solve in 300-word essays on each of the 26 letters of our alphabet.

At heart, though, Alphabet Juice is a vehicle for Blount’s ruminations not just on language but on culture and cultural literacy, on politics (he was apparently not a fan of the most recent President Bush), on music, on food, and so on. If you like his smart-folksy style, you’ll love the book.

P.S. Tender is the Thing.

Next up: Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, which I’m reading at the rate of roughly 15 pages a day because of all the writing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: history of language, Humor, Nonfiction, words

→ July 9, 2010
→ By keith

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (I linked to the hardcover edition because it’s actually cheaper than the paperback at the moment) bounces back and forth between wonky linguistics stuff and more plebeian arguments about how we use the English language today. I found the former stuff interesting but a little puzzling because McWhorter is arguing against a conventional wisdom that seems to ignore the facts (a familiar story), but that conventional wisdom was completely new to me, and I thought McWhorter didn’t give quite enough background in the current thinking in the History of English field to set the stage for his epic takedowns. The latter half was far more accessible even to someone who doesn’t share an interest in languages or linguistics, and a little more relevant to the current state of English.

McWhorter’s more academic arguments take aim at the intransigence (in his view) of History of English scholars who refuse to see what he considers obvious influences on the language by the Celts and, oddly enough, the Vikings, that explain our unusually simple grammar. English is part of the Indo-European language group, in the Germanic family, but unlike its Germanic siblings or most of its cousins within Indo-European, it has retained very little of the grammar of its proto-language ancestors. English doesn’t decline its nouns (as Slavic languages do) or its articles (as German does), and our verb conjugations are incredibly simple – we add an -s in the third person singular, and that’s pretty much it, with just a few irregular verbs. Why has English grammar become so much simpler than the grammars of its close relatives? According to McWhorter, the History of English groupthink has it that these changes happened spontaneously, without outside influences, but he feels that that’s nonsense because of the obvious similarities between English and Celtic. The language that became English came to the British Isles with the invaders who subjugated the Celts, and McWhorter attests that the Celts, rather than finding their language wiped out by the invasion, gradually melded their language with the proto-English spoken by the invaders, leaving vestiges like what the author calls “meaningless do” (our use of “do” with present participles, as in, “Do you like baseball, Adam?”). The Vikings, meanwhile, left their imprint largely in the simplification of our grammar, ignoring grammatical elements that their language lacked and “battering” English to lead it to drop verb and noun endings that most other modern languages have retained for centuries. If you’re wondering why we find Russian so hard to learn, or why English doesn’t have gender or noun cases or tables upon tables of verb endings, McWhorter lays out a compelling explanation.

The more accessible portion of the book comes in McWhorter’s discussions of what it means for a language like English to have a simpler grammar, and whether there is ever such a thing as “proper” grammar as long as meaning isn’t sacrificed. He turns his guns on linguistic anthropologists who’ve argued that language and grammar reflect thought, such as certain Native American tribes whose grammars lacked the future tense or specific numbering systems. But where I took issue with McWhorter’s views was in his criticism of what we might call the Lynne Truss school of grammar – the idea that language, written or especially oral, that does not hew tightly to the strict rules of English grammar, is inferior to “proper” English. He points out how supposed errors like ending sentences in prepositions actually date back centuries in common usage

There is, of course, a self-serving aspect to proper grammar – signalling. It’s difficult to gauge someone’s educational background without seeing a resume, and difficult to gauge someone’ s intelligence without extensive conversation (if it’s even possible then), so we send out and read signals that become proxies for things like intelligence, education, or even old-fashioned notions like “good breeding.” Attire is one. Accent may be another. Grammar is a third. When you meet someone who speaks proper English, you will likely notice, even subconsciously, whereas someone who can’t match verb and subject – even though the meaning of “he don’t got” is perfectly clear – will drop a notch or two in your estimation, whether you know it or not. Good grammarians, recognizing this, may seek to protect their turf by defending grammar as necessary to the survival of the language. McWhorter says, with some merit, that this is absurd: As long as meaning is clear, grammar isn’t that critical, and besides, all languages evolve over time, both in grammar and in vocabulary, so what is considered bad grammar today could easily become accepted usage in a few decades.

But beyond that, there’s value in having a standard grammar and insisting on some level that people hew to it, for simple reasons of comprehension. A universal set of rules for a language allows us to communicate effectively through written and oral means because we use grammar to fill in the missing context in sentences that are either complex or that leave out details provided in early sentences or paragraphs. In Italian and Spanish, the speaker/writer can omit the subject pronoun because the ending on the verb makes it clear who the subject is. Make the grammatical error and you lose clarity, so the reader has to go back to figure out who’s verbing, or the listener has to either accept his confusion or stop the speaker to ask for clarification.

I have also generally found text with bad grammar cacophonous, making it both slower and less pleasant to read than “proper” text. A misplaced modifier usually means I have to re-read a sentence, and an incorrect word choice – say, “flaunting” the rules rather than “flouting” them – is sort of like hearing a glass shatter in the background as I’m trying to read. We become accustomed to seeing or hearing the language operating within the rules of its grammar, and when someone flouts them (sorry), it affects our ability to understand or to move smoothly through the spoken or written text.

Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue does lapse occasionally into linguistics jargon, and I could see the Celtic/English chapter being dull to anyone not interested in languages, but McWhorter tries to keep it light with some humor and a healthy dose of snark directed at linguists who (in his view) refuse to see the obvious signs of connections between English and Celtic and English and the Vikings’ language.

Back before the dish existed – B.D.? – I reviewed McWhorter’s The Power of Babel, a more general-interest book on the history of human languages.

I’m all screwed up in terms of what I’m reviewing next, but I am almost halfway through reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Filed Under: Languages, Nonfiction Tagged With: history of language, Languages, linguistics, Nonfiction, snark